POLITICS
The firm-jawed acceptable face of soggy consensus politics
NOEL MALCOLM
Sheffield hope you won't be like the other journalists,' said the SDP member who had kindly offered to give me a lift to the conference centre, 'writing only about the negative side of things.' Having thus been spared a long walk through the maze of concrete dual carriageways which goes by the name of Sheffield, I am under a moral obligation to think positively. There are times when one's moral obligations can just be too heavy to bear.
One positive thing at least can be said of all the SDP members who attended last weekend's conference: they were in favour of tolerance. Indeed, they were so much in favour of it that any speaker who gave the slightest impression of being intolerant was booed, heckled, jeered at and slow- handclapped. Those who pleaded for toler- ance were applauded — until they indi- cated who precisely, in their opinion, deserved to be tolerated.
The first Owenite to speak from the rostrum got off to a bad start. 'I've been in politics for a hell of a long time.' (Heckler: `Then why are you leaving?' Laughter.) He carried on gamely. 'I used to be a Tory.' (Groans, laughter and cries of `ah!') 'I joined the SDP in 1981 and I worked like a black.' (A sharp, scandalised intaking of breath, loud boos, and a noise which I find hard to analyse — I think Orwell describes it in his account of 'hate sessions' in 1984.) `I used to work in the Ministry of Defence.' (An explosion of laughter, as if in relief at knowing that he had reached the final punch-line.) For the mergerites, this thumbnail self-portrait offered the perfect confirmation of what they already knew: the average Owenite was an unrecon structed ex-Tory militarist. To come from the Conservative Party was a much greater crime than going to the Liberal Party could ever be.
As at the Liberal Assembly in Blackpool the previous week, the way to get the audience on one's side was to attack the Tories. Despite all the SDP's even-handed rhetoric about breaking the old duopoly, there were ten attacks on Mrs Thatcher for every one on Mr Kinnock. This is under- standable in the case of the mergerites, who have to fall in now with the Grimond Doctrine concerning the realignment of the Left. And it is understandable in the Owenites' case, because they have to avoid, more than anything else, the appearance of being lackeys of Thatcher- ism. But it risks ignoring all the polls of voting intentions since the last election, which consistently show that most of the floating voters who have left the Alliance have drifted to the Conservatives instead. When the SDP was originally formed, it drew more voters from Labour than from the Tories. Much of the political landscape has changed during the last seven years, and the underlying question at Sheffield (underlying because it was buried beneath a thick layer of rancour and recrimination) was whether the SDP's whole political strategy could be altered sufficiently to cope with the new terrain.
When Roy Jenkins first put forward his plans for a new party in his 1979 Dimbleby Lecture, he spoke at length about the virtues of proportional representation. He also spoke at length about the sort of centre party which would flourish under such an electoral system. But he failed to explain how such a centre party could grow sufficiently strong under the present system to gain legislative power and make prop- ortional representation a reality. For years, he continued to talk about the SDP fulfill- ing a new role in the centre, rather than taking over from Labour in the old role of second party. Only young hotheads such as David Owen talked about replacing Labour; because of this, some observers described Dr Owen as on the left wing of the new party.
Now, deliciously, the positions are ex- actly reversed. 'Let us have some regard to our duty to the electorate,' said Lord Jenkins at Sheffield. 'Let us show greater feeling for the realities of politics.' His argument now is that big is beautiful, and that a new merged party will be better qualified to win an outright majority in the House of Commons, in order to push through proportional representation. Scep- tics may wonder whether the new party would be quite so keen on changing the voting system once it had actually won an outright majority under the present system (just as, conversely, the Liberal Party showed no interest in PR until it stopped winning general elections); but this is already to enter into the higher realms of scepticism, since the prospects of an out- right SLDP victory are wildly remote.
Meanwhile, Dr Owen has settled down on Roy Jenkins's old ground, and is thinking in terms of a centre party which might achieve power through 'hung Parlia- ments' and power-broking. With transcen- dent cheek, his followers spent the weekend accusing the mergerites of putting expediency above principle, of throwing away their political ideals in order to clutch at power. Dr Owen takes credit, quite properly, for his strong sense of political realism; and political realism is simply expediency by another name. When, in the early days, the SDP was hitting 40 per cent in the opinion polls, it was realistic (i.e. expedient) to contemplate replacing Labour altogether; now, with the Alliance jogging along at 12 per cent, it is realistic (i.e. expedient) to think in terms of power- broking instead.
At Sheffield, the Owenites presented themselves as paragons of ideological pur- ity. It is true that, with the exception of the odd manifesto here and there, Dr Owen has consistently opposed the more extreme Liberal doctrines on defence, nuclear pow- er, economic growth and the control of inflation. But his consistency in saying what he is against has helped to conceal a steady shift to the Right in what he is for. In 1981 he was still content to describe social democracy as a form of socialism, even though the revised edition of his book, Face the Future, cut out the word 'social- ism' whenever conveniently possible. Now he says little about socialism, and when you ask him why he does not join the Conservatives he talks about his grand- parents voting Labour.
This political landscape has indeed changed during the Thatcher years, but perhaps not so much as everyone thinks. The population has swallowed the most palatable parts of the Thatcherite diet, such as privatisation and the reduction of union power, but it still prefers to leave the hard kernel of free-market radicalism on the side of its plate. Any major rethinking of the role of the Welfare State, for exam- ple, is simply rejected by the majority of the electorate, who are in favour of spend- ing more money on the existing system. News of the death of the old consensus has, it seems, been much exaggerated. All the signs at the moment suggest that what people want is a sort of soft-core Conser- vatism. Dr Owen, far from striding off into the wilderness for the sake of ideological purity, has slithered into an area of soggy right-of-centre terrain which may, in the long run, prove to be rich pasture indeed.
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